ceiling clean is the best way to do this, traditional way to do this to where we are now which is how big a deficit reduction package should accompany it. >> well, i think as the speaker of the house is discovering tonight, it is the reality we all live with here in washington, lawrence, which is this is a divided government, a two-party system. nobody gets entirely what he or she wants, and yes, if we had been doing this in the normal way as has been historically done, there would have been a clean debt ceiling vote, which has traditionally been unpleasant vote often for members of congress, but routine, noncontroversial, and certainly not tied to any deficit reduction package or any other measure for that matter. what happens is the speaker of the house made clear and republicans in general that they were linking the willingness to raise the debt ceiling to significant deficit reduction. as you know for a long time, we rejected the link, but because we believe we need to reduce our deficit and get our debt under control. we also worked concurrently as we moved through the spring and int